Together artist and astrobiologist construct an organism and a conversation using ZOOB, a building toy designed by Michael Joaquin Grey and inspired by biological and social networks.

For the past twenty years, Michael Joaquin Grey has been creating work that extends and plays with the boundaries of art, science, and media. His investigations revolve around the development and the origins of life, language, and form-as related to natural and complex systems. Critical moments in natural phenomena and culture are objects in his work, as are the prepositional states of change between matter, energy, behavior, and meaning. Grey’s artistic exploration led to the invention of Zoob, a modeling system and toy that emulates dynamic and living systems. Michael Joaquin Grey’s work has been exhibited and collected internationally, including Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center. Chris Impey is a University Distinguished Professor and Deputy Head of the Department, in charge of all academic programs. His research interests are observational cosmology, gravitational lensing, and the evolution and structure of galaxies. Impey is a past Vice President of the American Astronomical Society. He has also been an NSF Distinguished Teaching Scholar, a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, and the Carnegie Council on Teaching’s Arizona Professor of the Year. Impey has written over thirty popular articles on cosmology and astrobiology and co-authored two introductory textbooks. His first popular book “The Living Cosmos,” was published in 2007; his second, called How It Ends, will be published in 2010. In 2009 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.